Duncan of Syrup & Tang tagged me ages ago to list 7 food facts about myself. It has taken me a long time to write something up because to be frank, I couldn’t think of anything factually interesting to write about. 7 is an awfully big number. I rather fondly remember when I was 7; a carefree age, unencumbered by anything. At 7 I was in primary school enjoying jam sandwiches for lunch and playing jump-rope with friends. Now, I’m loving everything to do with being aged some-number-above-27. I don’t know if anyone else would find much of the following interesting, but anyway, here goes :

1. I am very unfortunately, very intolerant of alcohol. Not to the point of breaking out into a rash like a fellow asian friend of mine, but one margarita (my favourite cocktail), and I’m whizzing through the various stages of intoxication, from happiness, depression, anger, denial, acceptance, being hung over and recovery. All within half an hour or so. Some wines make me sneeze. All of this is highly annoying when I’m in a restaurant and rather feebly have to be the only person at the table to decline wine. B also finds this annoying because if I’m not going to drink, I should at least learn how to drive so that he can drink and leave me in charge of getting us home safely. I don’t drive, but that fact belongs to an entirely different list.

2. That said, I like alcohol and love using it in food : red wine pears, prunes in armagnac, a Calvados cream sauce with pork, Triple Sec or Kahlua in a flourless chocolate cake, Kirsch truffles. Currently, I also love Pepperjack Cab Sav (which doesn’t make me sneeze), Little Creatures Pale Ale and Knappstein Reserve Lager.

3. I also can’t handle caffeine. This intolerance seems to have crept up on me over the years. I fondly remember knocking back espressos while in Italy, and am amazed now that I could ever have done that (these days, even black tea makes me feel a bit ill on occasion). So I’m relegated to the cattle class of coffee drinking : decaf. I know I’m not the only caffeinely-challanged drinker out there, so it’s upsetting to find that a lot of cafes or restaurants still serve a pretty bad decaf.

4. In Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, a monster accidentally unleashed by Isaac, can taste it’s “food” in the air and as it flies over the city, is able to sense it like a “massive, invisible flavour trail”. These flavour trails remind me of the images I have in my head of cities I have visited. The scent of food links me to the various memories I have of different places. Venice for example, smells of perfectly ripe fuzzy peaches; Amsterdam of Ritter Sport chocolate bars and Earl Grey tea; Kuala Lumpur of fumes from generators used by the roadside stalls while pressing sugarcane juice, deep-frying cempedak seeds, preparing sugary peanut pancakes and ladling out fresh beancurd into tiffins; Paris of explosively crispy, buttery croissants, Marco Polo tea and ripe cheese; Belfast of home-made stews and wheaten bread hot from the toaster, and New Zealand smells of fresh air and the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten.

5. I will watch or read anything remotely related to food. Even if it’s a reality TV program like The Restaurant or Marco Pierre White’s Hell’s Kitchen. I loved Tom & Jerry as a kid because a lot of their squabbles involved food, such as The Little Orphan and The Midnight Snack. Now that I think of it, a lot of my all-time favourite computer games also have something to do with food – Tapper, BurgerTime, Super Mario, The Sims (love the chopping and humming as they cook, and the fact that they can burn down an entire house with their efforts if they have zero cooking experience) and Katamari Damacy.

6. I’m a chilli addict. As a teenager, I used to put MasterFoods Mexican Chilli Powder in everything. If memory serves me correctly, I might even have taken a bottle of it with me once on a family holiday overseas. Nowadays I like using my mom’s homemade chilli and garlic paste or dried chilli flakes, which I own a big container of. To a lesser extent, if I could eat chorizo with every meal, I probably would.

7. I can’t eat eggs for breakfast. I once worked in a fantastic French bistro and we had a ritual every morning at 9:30 where everyone had to stop what they were doing and have breakfast together. Various sections were relegated the task of preparing something with eggs and making toast. Since I spent a couple of years in this place, I kind of OD-ed on eggs, and haven’t yet fully regained interest in soft-boiled or scrambled eggs. It also took me two years after many staff dinners, to rekindle my love of pasta with tomato sauce, but I still hate shepherd’s pie.

In turn, I would like to tag Mirness at Imploding Central, whose blog isn’t about food, but who I know is as much into food as I am, the lovely Erielle of Fancy Toast who is currently a soon-to-be-mother so she might not have the time to respond to this tag, and a friend and fantastic writer Quick at twobluefish if he can find time out of his hectic working, theatre-going and famous-people-interviewing schedule to write something edible about himself.